


if i'm being honest (i bet it's not that at all)

by greekdemigod



Category: Dead To Me (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Spoilers for Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:15:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24304960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greekdemigod/pseuds/greekdemigod
Summary: Jen has a big revelation about Judy and it's a lot.
Relationships: Judy Hale/Jen Harding
Comments: 22
Kudos: 179





	if i'm being honest (i bet it's not that at all)

**Author's Note:**

> i can't casually like anything, only obsessively, so here we are!

There are dinosaur bandaids wrapped around several of her fingers—there’s two on her left middle finger, which she finds kinda funny—and her ribs hurt sometimes when she belly laughs, but she certainly shouldn’t be bedbound and fussed over any longer.

“Are you _sure_?” Judy is gnawing on her bottom lip, hovering at a half-step away in case Jen very suddenly decides she _does_ want to go back to feeling a miserable shit and spending every day in bed.

She swats at her best friend, eyebrows crinkling with frustration. “Back off, honey. We got hit a little, I’m not _dead_.” Her mind flashes to Ted—she can see Judy’s does too—but she barks a laugh that sits all in the throat. “I want to sit outside.”

“Do you want to hold onto my arm?”

“Fuck no, I don’t want to hold onto your arm. Can you give me some room to breathe, Judes?”

“Sure, yes, of course.” The worry and concern is ever so evident, laced through her wavering voice, and she doesn’t look happy to comply. But she _does_ and Jen has never appreciated her more than in this moment.

The walk to the backyard takes something out of her. There’s a breathlessness and windedness to her that shames her just a little. Closing her eyes to the sunlight, head tipping back as if to bask in it, she takes a few moments to compose herself.

She feels an itch behind her ribs. She feels her throat constricting around her swallow.

“Do you want me to get you something to eat?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Judy.” Jen opens her eyes to a stricken look on Judy’s face, corners of her mouth turned down, sadness shimmering in those big brown eyes. She sighs out her breath that takes the tension from her back and shoulders with it and melts into the shape of the lounge chair. “You don’t have to keep taking care of me.”

“But I want to—”

“Yeah, but you don’t _have_ to.”

Reaching into the space between them, she takes Judy’s hand into her own. Flawless fingers glinting with rings and jewelry slide easily around Jen’s, cut-up, bruised, and bandaged.

Things really could have been much worse. She didn’t even have to go to the hospital, although Judy insisted on it for hours anyway, _just to be sure_. She is _fine_. Jen Harding is always fine.

“I really appreciate you, Judy, I do. But I just want to feel... normal.” Before she can stop herself she shrugs to underline her point, but it jolts through every tender part of her chest, pain rolling through her in waves.

Judy huffs out a breath that stirs her bangs slightly. She really is fucking adorable, Jen thinks, but she doesn’t dwell—something keeps scratching at the back of her mind, an elusive thought that flees whenever she tries to examine it.

“I want to do nice things for you all the time, not just now.” She watches her friend pull her hand out of her grasp to cup it around her cheek instead, thumb moving along where she knows a large bruise to be slowly discoloring from black to purple. “Accepting help doesn’t make you weak.”

Jen has never been more grateful to have her boys ruin a moment between them, because that touched on too much to get into this early in the morning.

Charlie being outwardly affectionate and respectful has at least been a nice development. He cleans up his dirty socks these days, doesn’t talk back when he’s asked to take his plate to the sink or to help Henry with his homework.

Henry now looks at Judy as if she’s an angel even more than he already did. Like a cat, he bumps his curly head into her hand, and Judy, smile like a thousand fucking watts, treads her fingers through them, trailing all the way down to his neck. “What is it, buddy?”

“Can I take some strawberries to school today?”

“Of course you can. Want me to help you?”

“Yeah!”

Something clenches hard in Jen’s chest. She tries to ignore it—like she has been ignoring the rush of affection and the swell of love every time Judy does something selfless and kind—but for once it doesn’t want to budge. Judy smiles at her before getting up to take the boys to the kitchen and all she can think is, _have you always been this beautiful?_

And then, as sure and clear and intense as all the other truths in her life, reality shifts just a bit to accomodate this new one: she is in love with Judy Hale.

Light shines differently on every memory now, as she’s sat wondering where this is coming from and realizing that it has always been there. How could she not have _known_? The slight disconnect to all the songs, the books, the movies—the way they described love and she just didn’t have that, it was different, but it was true—she’d always been so sure that it was _true_.

She has never let anyone get close enough. That she can trace back to losing her mother, to the hurt and the anger and the grief that she’s been carrying with her for decades—she had vowed to herself, a bereaved nineteen-year-old, that she would never let anyone hurt her like that again.

So that’s why her friendship with Judy has always felt like reinventing what it means to love someone.

She has never been in love before, not with Ted, not with her college boyfriends, not with Ben—never before until now.

The revelations are happening even without her thinking about them. Jen has gotten up and is marching resolutely to her kitchen, biting through the discomfort, and she can feel the half-truths and the lies and the repressed memories falling apart to reveal the truths hidden beneath them all.

She has been starving herself of true, meaningful connections all her life.

Skidding to a halt, Jen keeps herself from speaking any of it, though it eagerly supplies itself to the tip of her tongue. Judy is cleaning the kitchen isle, her hair falling into her face, the muscles in her arms bunching as she wipes the marble down.

She can’t tell Judy. She _can’t_. And fuck, her mind is going through all the time they’ve spent together, taking away the filter through which she’d viewed it all, the lens of her supposed heterosexuality falling away—every touch she yearned for, every smile memorized, the beauty of her like a sunflower prostrating itself beneath the sun. She can’t risk losing her.

“What’s up? You look like you saw a ghost.”

“Where are the boys?”

Judy whirls through the kitchen like she belongs in it, like it’s her home—it _is_ , and shit, yeah, there was nothing platonic in how desperately Jen wanted her to be here all the time, to be part of her family. “They’re grabbing their backpacks and coats.”

“Right, okay.”

She takes the last wobbly steps to the stool and sits down on it heavily, finds her fingers shaking before she clamps them together in her lap.

A life-altering realization in her _forties_? Fucking hell.

“Jen?”

She looks up into her best friend’s kind face. Judy’s suddenly so close, combing her hand through her hair like she did to her son, holding her like she’s fragile and breakable—for once she can’t shake it, be angry, because she _feels_ breakable. She’s shaking to pieces.

“You’re worrying me, Jen. Is it migraine again? Are you—”

“No, it’s—”

“Do I need to get you to the hospital?”

“No, Judy, stop, it’s nothing like—”

“Will you just _tell_ me what’s going on, then?”

“I think I’m fucking gay!”

The silence that drops is heavy, oppressive. Judy’s face has contorted, mouth agape, eyebrows risen so high they’re hidden behind her bangs. Brown eyes are flitting across her face, searching— _what_?

Then Judy has her hands bunched into the front of Jen’s shirt, drags her close, and rather than sweeping romance, Jen freezes up entirely and their mouths bump awkwardly, rigidly—Judy recoils instantly, tears in her eyes before words can even be uttered, hands flying up into her hair, and there’s someone saying _shit, shit, shit_ and it isn’t Jen for once.

“Stop,” Jen whispers, trembling with the sparks of pleasure that thump in her goddamn wrists, with how hard her heart is battering itself against her ribs. She laces her fingers around Judy’s wrists and pulls them away from her face, down between them. Her grip slips lower until their hands are linked. “Why did you just try to kiss me?”

“I thought—I’m so sorry, Jen. I don’t want our friendship to—”

“You meant to, then?” Her voice is only calm on the surface, because hope—oh, _hope_. It has never found a more flammable object than it has in Jen Harding in this very moment, within a fraction of her first taste of oblivion.

Judy’s bottom lip juts out, the pout not helping Jen to stay clear-headed at all. “I’m sorry.”

She surges up and kisses Judy Hale. This time she doesn’t freeze. This time there _is_ a swooping, low in her gut. Judy’s arms snake around her instantly, gathering her close, and Jen lets her, long past not wanting Judy to hug her.

This kiss is more like it, pouring heavy warmth into her, a suffocating explosion of longing, but there remains an edge of awkwardness, an uncertainty of her footing as she tries to recallibrate Judy Hale from _best friend_ to _person I’m kissing_.

Judy angles her head differently, drags the tip of her tongue against Jen’s upper lip, and all thoughts vanish except the one, _she’s always been the person that’s everything to me, that hasn’t changed_.

It gets easier to kiss her after that.

**Author's Note:**

> KISSING YOUR BEST FRIEND FOR THE FIRST TIME IS FUCKING WEIRD AND AWKWARD AND MORE FICS SHOULD TALK ABOUT IT, thank you for coming to my ted talk  
> i hope you enjoyed reading!


End file.
